Friday, March 21, 2014

On Original Sin and Inherent Doubt

On Original Sin
and Inherent Doubt

In
this essay, I shall take the tale of Genesis at face value; yet I myself do not
take that tale literally. This is logician’s jujitsu; refutation by reduction
to the absurd. I propose to prove that preaching the Doctrine of Original Sin
is itself either sinful, or hypocritical. The proof is as follows:

1) The Doctrine of
Original Sin states that gaining knowledge of good and evil was itself a sin,
because it negated the alibi of ignorance.

2) This doctrine is
either true or false.

3) If the doctrine is
false, then it is an error, specifically a moral error - hence a sin to preach.

4) If the doctrine is
true, then it constitutes knowledge, specifically knowledge about good and
evil, hence is itself an instance of what it calls a sin. To commit a sin in
the very act of denouncing it is hypocrisy.

5) Therefore to preach
the doctrine of original sin is either sinful or hypocritical. QED.

Some notes:

1) The doctrine of
original sin is tenditious; it tells only half the tale. If Eve brought sin
into the world, then she also brought virtue; for before knowledge, there is
neither sin nor virtue nor choice nor freedom. The Apple of Knowledge of Good
and Evil is the fruit of the Liberty Tree.

2) For a Bronze-Age
myth like Genesis, no wavering, no grey areas, no paradoxes, no decadent modern
doubts, just straight-up black-and-white dualism! That’s part of the reductio
ad absurdum.

3) The doctrine of
original sin, if false, is no minor moral error; indeed it makes a mockery of
all morality. Why should it be wrong to know right from wrong? Especially if
the rationale is; if we didn’t know right from wrong, then the difference
wouldn’t trouble us! That’s not morality, it’s nihilism. If a prisoner facing
trial testified that it’s wrong to know right from wrong, then the defense
attorney would win with an insanity plea, and the prisoner would then go to an
institute for the criminally insane, and there be treated like a specimen.

4) The doctrine of
original sin claims to be knowledge about good and evil, yet it denounces such
knowledge; hence its inherent hypocrisy.

5) If original sin is
false, then to preach it is the sin of nihilism; if it is true, then to preach
it is the sin of hypocrisy. Either way it is a sin to preach original sin; and
we are urged to abjure sin.

***

What specifically did
the doctrine do wrong? Just this; it’s a doctrine.
The doctrine of original sin claims to know
that it’s wrong to know right from wrong. It pretends to certainty; but in
matters that deep, certainty itself is an error.

I therefore counter-propose,
not a rival doctrine, but an heuristic; a question, not an answer. I call it
the Conjecture of Inherent Doubt, and you can phrase it these ways:

It may be wrong to know right from wrong;

or

No-one can prove that it is right to know right
from wrong;

or

You don’t know if it is right to know right from
wrong.

In short, the human moral
sense may be erronious! This isn’t nihilism; it denies nothing; but it is skepticism and relativism and
agnosticism. If original sin is the self-accusation of a scolding moralist,
then inherent doubt is the self-querying of a perplexed philosopher.

If the conjecture of inherent
doubt is false, then you can prove
that it is right to know right from wrong; so the conjecture would be a
correctable error; so as sins go, it would be venial, not mortal. A vice, not a
crime.

And if the conjecture
of inherent doubt is true, then you could not prove it, for it would be one of
the moral truths that it declares mysterious. An unprovable moral truth is a
revelation.

Therefore the
conjecture of inherent doubt is at worst a forgiveable vice, and is perhaps a
mystic revelation.

***

I understand that some
fundamentalists have a lot invested into the doctrine of original sin; they
claim that without it, the crucifixion is meaningless, and with it
Christianity. I do not see how this follows. Surely the Beatitudes count to a
Christian, and the Golden Rule, and various other stories and parables; what
bearing does the crucifixion, let alone Eve, have on those?